What's Meaning Got to Do With It: The Role of Vocabulary in Word Reading and Reading Comprehension

By Gene P. Ouellette. 2006

1,087 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is at present no clear consensus as to the nature of the relations between oral vocabulary and specific literacy skills. The present study distinguished between vocabulary breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to better explain the role of oral vocabulary in various reading skills. A sample of 60 typically developing Grade 4 students was assessed on measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary breadth, depth of vocabulary knowledge, decoding, visual word recognition, and reading comprehension. Concurrent analyses revealed that each distinct reading skill was related to the vocabulary measures in a unique manner. Receptive vocabulary breadth was the only oral vocabulary variable that predicted decoding performance after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. In contrast, expressive vocabulary breadth predicted visual word recognition, whereas depth of vocabulary knowledge predicted reading comprehension. The results are discussed in terms of interrelations between phonological and semantic factors in the acquisition of distinct reading skills.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02c12cb09e8aab6736baad6cdac62751c6fb9615

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Citations in the corpus

A not-so-simple view of reading: how oral vocabulary and visual-word recognition complicate the story (2010, methodology): “Recent investigations ( Ouellette, 2006; Ricketts et al., 2007; Senechal, Ouellette, & Rodney, 2006) also concur that oral vocabulary significantly predicts reading comprehension once word reading skills are more established, and intervention studies have repeatedly shown the importance of vocabula”
The Impact of Specific Language Impairment on Adolescents' Written Text (2009, background): “Both receptive and expressive vocabulary are related to reading performance (Ouellette, 2006; Tannenbaum, Torgesen, & Wagner, 2006; Wise, Sevcik, Morris, Lovett, & Wolf, 2007).”
Exploring intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation among very good and very poor readers (2012, background): “There is a wealth of research highlighting the relationship between children’s phonological skills and reading attainment (Boscardin et al. 2008) and language skills and reading attainment (Kendeou et al. 2009; Ouellette 2006).”
Promoting Language and Literacy in Young Dual Language Learners: Research, Practice, and Policy (2011, background): “but deep knowledge of words may be particularly important (Ouellette, 2006).”
The Importance of Early Vocabulary for Literacy Achievement in High-Poverty Schools (2008, background): “vocabulary depth) and specific aspects of reading (see Ouellette, 2006 , for a discussion).”
Why the Simple View of Reading Is Not Simplistic: Unpacking Component Skills of Reading Using a Direct and Indirect Effect Model of Reading (DIER) (2017, background): “…knowledge) are hypothesized to predict word reading proficiency based on a theoretical conceptualization (Bishop & Snowling, 2004) and empirical findings (Kim et al., 2013; Foorman et al., 2015; Ouellette, 2006; Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop, 2007; Vellutino, Tunmer, Jaccard, & Chen, 2007).”
Teaching for breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Learning from explicit and implicit instruction and the storybook texts (2019, background): “Among 4th grade students, a study that tested the ability to verbally define words showed that depth predicted reading comprehension beyond the association explained by measures of breadth (Ouellette, 2006).”
Psychometric Evaluation of a Receptive Vocabulary Test for Greek Elementary Students (2011, background): “In this context, it is necessary to identify valid indices of both the depth and breadth of lexical knowledge (Ouellette, 2006), which, according to one view, should reflect the existence of lexical entries associated with redundant (phonological, orthographic, and semantic) information (Perfetti, 2”
Theory of Mind: a Hidden Factor in Reading Comprehension? (2018, background): “…(e.g., Grissmer et al. 2010), linguistic ability (e.g., Ouellette and Beers 2010), reading fluency (e.g., Kim et al. 2012), vocabulary (e.g., Ouellette 2006), inference-making (e.g., Kendeou et al. 2008), working memory (e.g., Cain et al. 2004), and motivation (e.g., Guthrie et al. 2007)…”
Understanding Depth of Vocabulary Online With Bilingual and Monolingual Children (2009, methodology): “Nation & Snowling, 2004), tasks that require children to define nouns with semantically related terminology (Davidson, Klein, & Snow, 1986; Ouellette, 2006; Vermeer, 2001), or tasks that require students to assign attributes to nouns (K.”
The Components of the Simple View of Reading: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (2012, methodology): “Furthermore, vocabulary has been found to correlate highly with word recognition measures (Kendeou, Savage, & van den Broek, 2009; Ouellette, 2006) and to take up much or most of reading comprehension variance associated with printdependent measures, such as word accuracy and fluency (Protopapas,…”
Growth and predictors of change in English language learners' reading comprehension (2013, methodology): “In this respect, it might be that the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised used in this study to assess vocabulary knowledge is not sufficiently demanding, and therefore, it does not reliably predict growth in reading comprehension (Ouellette, 2006; Tannenbaum, Torgesen & Wagner, 2006).”